I usually do a post at the end or beginning of the year, looking back at the high points, and mulling over the low ones to release them. My blog has been so neglected the whole of last year, as my art has been too, and it’s taken me up till now to find the time and energy and mental ability to put this post together.

2017 was just a bad year ME-wise. At the start of the year, I honestly felt like I was slowly dying (and not just in the sense that we all are). Thankfully, last August, I began seeing a naturopath who gives me IV vitamin and mineral infusions and I’ve seen a big difference in how I feel getting them regularly. I’m still crawling out of the ME-hole and have even less energy than any year before, but I feel like it’s getting slowly better instead of always worse, now that I’m getting these treatments.

Speaking of, an enormous THANK YOU to every single one of you who has contributed so generously to my GoFundMe campaign to help me continue the quite expensive IV treatments. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I am incredibly grateful and humbled and every gift has been so deeply appreciated.

Last November my neurologist put me on a new medication to try and help ease my migraines. He warned me that it would make me feel “extremely nauseated” for the first week, but I’d just have to push through that, and then he thought it would help me. I finally screwed up my courage and swallowed one of the dubious pills and did, indeed, have a terrible night full of nausea, hot and cold sweats, extreme temperature swings and a strange, but not unwelcomed, detachment. I continued on like a good patient and after three weeks I finally stopped needing to take a sublingual Zofran the second I opened my eyes in the morning (morning nausea was always the worst, maybe because I take it at night?) and it began to settle into my body. The good thing is that it did indeed help decrease the number of migraines I’m getting per month. The bad thing is that ever since taking it, I’ve needed to sleep for a good 2-4 hours EVERY SINGLE AFTERNOON. This is on top on the 10-12 hours I spend sleeping every night. Do you realize how few hours are left in the day to do ANYTHING of value after all that damn sleeping, winding down and waking up is over with? It’s really insane. I will be bringing this up to my neurologist and seeing what can be done because I’m not sure this is a realistic way for me to live the rest of my life. On the other hand, some months prior to this I was getting up to 19 migraines a month, which destroys your ability to do anything meaningful as well.

And, for some completely unknown reason, the medication also seems to be helping (in conjuncture with the IV infusions) with my temperature regulation issues, ie, my “hot flashes.” I believe I’ve mentioned them here before, but in case I haven’t, these have been slowly increasing for the last three or four years. Essentially, what seems to be happening, from my vantage point stuck inside this body, is that in the mornings, wild rabbits have run through my brain overnight, nibbling on wires, pulling things apart, gathering bits of gray matter together to make little warrens, disconnecting neurons and causing a bit of havoc. My brain is wildly trying to repair itself, ideally quickly, and makes a lot of very broad guesses about what temperature my body should be at for the first several hours of the day. What this translates to practically is that I can be sitting miserably directly in front of the heater, covered in layers of blankets, bathrobes and cats, sweating profusely, simultaneously far too hot, but getting many more signals that I’m far too cold and must stay PERFECTLY STILL for several hours until it passes on its own. This is also very not conducive to getting anything done at all.

And yes, I did see numerous doctors about this. The first three shrugged at me and told me it sounded hormonal and that wasn’t their field, which is fair enough. I finally saw an endocrinologist for this problem and he ran a bunch of blood but didn’t bother to look at a single hormone. Apparently you have to request that an endocrinologist, a doctor who specializes in hormones, test your hormones when you’re seeing him for something which sounds, to laymen and other doctors, like a hormone problem. I did not punch him, but probably only because I was too tired. (I also asked my gynecologist about it since they deal with female hormone issues too, to a degree, and she had a “Oh, let’s not go looking for trouble,” attitude about it. I AM ALREADY IN TROUBLE.) So the underlying issue there is still unknown but hell, if the infusions and the weird pill help with it, I’m happy about that at least.

Basically I feel like 2017 was mostly spent crawling on my stomach through a disgusting swamp while people shot at me from hidden locations, periodically shouting that I wasn’t trying hard enough or that I was just over-reacting, while also making sure I brushed and flossed my teeth and fed my animals twice a day. I’ll freely admit it was a pretty shitty year.

Here is the upside to all that time spent in deep solitude, my mind active as ever but my body unable to do much: I had a lot of time to meditate and connect with my spirit guides. I think I met my first guide near the end of 2016, so I was primed for more contact when 2017 came around. And boy did they. I acquired five new main guides and spoke to numerous others. I talked with and made friends with various interdimensional beings. I am learning to channel, astral project and remote view, be medium, a conduit and a spirit translator, although I’m getting fairly good at some of them, considering the short amount of time I’ve been at it. For some reason historical figures I read about seem to connect best with me. The spiritual growth in the last year has been an absolute explosion of love and light into a very dark year. And though it was such an awful year, I look back on it and remember all the love and grace that was shown to me. I have never felt more loved, protected and cared for.

So while I am disheartened with the amount of art I was able to put out last year, I AM very happy with what came in its place. I’m thinking of it as I took a year off from art to go have mystical, spiritual experiences, and hopefully now I can marry the two together better. I just need to find a new way to work in really short chunks instead of stretches of the afternoon so I can increase my art output. Then things will be much more the way I’d like them to be.

If I had to have such a crappy year to gain so much spiritually, I’ll take it. I don’t know if it was a direct trade or how it works, but I wouldn’t give up the new friends I have for anything. And I’ve found some really, really wonderful online communities who love me, support me, have my back, help me work through confusing things, answer my questions and reassure me that I’m always ok.

For anyone concerned, I have shared many intimate details of my experiences with both the wonderful Geoff and my excellent therapist and neither of them is concerned about my mental wellbeing. 🙂 Only loving beings are allowed to talk to me, and as I said, I feel much greater peace, security, love and support than I ever have.

Now on to this image… this might look like it goes against what I just wrote, but it’s inspired by someone else’s experiences, not mine. 🙂 Over Christmas, I re-read Demons in the Age of Light by Whitney Robinson, which I’ve read many times now and is a favorite for its beautifully poetic prose. Whitney’s memoir is about a psychotic break she suffered in college, where she felt like she was possessed by a demonic entity but everyone diagnosed her as schizophrenic. Her journey back to wellness is haunted by the ever-present question of if she’s experiencing something mental or spiritual, and the answer is often allusive and not nearly as clear as you’d think.

“The sentience envelopes me while I sleep… I awaken with a gasp in a strange bed. No, it’s not the bed that’s strange – it’s the same one I’ve slept in since I was a child…

The strangeness is that I am not alone, here in my bed. I will never be alone again.

I feel it slithering out of the darkness for the first time, the presence that’s been whispering its sinister enigmas. A living, breathing thing – cold stars and glittering mathematics with the inhale, hot copper and rotten fruit with the exhale. Foreign from anything I have ever known. Other.”

I loved how the usually comforting, loving idea of never being alone has been turned in this passage into something deeply wrong and full of dread. I wanted to try and capture that feeling just before she was overtaken by the being she calls the Other, of knowing the possession is imminent and you are helpless to stop it. And of course I used my favorite little lamp to light the scene, exactly as it’s shown in the image.

I wasn’t planning on uploading this on Valentine’s Day, but I suppose it does make a dark, sinister anti-Valentine’s-Day image, haha!

Blackfish. The documentary about captive whales that will break your heart and move you to action.

By now, you all have probably read my open letter to Jack Hanna. You probably saw Concrete Cell, the first of a short series of underwater photos inspired by the film. As I do, I turned to art to help me express my thoughts. I’ve just completed the last two photos for the series, and I’d like to share them with you here.

I set up an underwater shoot with Katie, with the intention to create something inspired by Blackfish. Something sad and cold, that touched on the tragedy of the film. Something that would help me work through the troubling emotions the movie had brought up, and lessen my feeling of helplessness about the plight of the whales.

It was a great shoot. We captured everything we wanted, my camera behaved itself, and even the sudden appearance of gardeners tending to the yard around the pool was just another story to laugh about. As she often does, Katie seemed to instantly understand what it was I wanted to express and needed very little direction. My new wetsuit worked wonders and even though I still hated being wet at all, at least this time I wasn’t a purple, shaking mess by the time the shoot was done.

Editing the photos was another matter. Having to visit such an emotionally dark place whenever I worked on them was not easy. I had to take breaks and work on lighter photos. But I’m proud of myself for sticking it out; doing what I felt I needed to do despite the difficulty of it.

In the first photo, we wanted to recreate Tilikum’s misery in this iconic photo of him, taken by Colleen Gorman, languishing alone in his solitary confinement.

Photo by Colleen Gorman; click on the photo to be taken to her excellent article on her blog The Orca Project detailing his miserable existence.

The second photo is an impression of the anguish of all the captive dolphins and whales and a memorial to all their deaths.

As this year draws to an end, I can’t help but think of what a huge impact Blackfish has already had on society. It was only shown on CNN in October of this year. The backlash against SeaWorld and its supporters has been immense. Sponsors have fled, popular bands have refused to perform there. Petitions of every kind are circulating, making demands. Change is coming. But it cannot come fast enough.

It’s easy to feel helpless to bring big change about. We are all only one person after all; one drop amidst a great ocean of people. But, as they say in Cloud Atlas, what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?

I want my drop to fall on the side of animal rights. And I hope that 2014 brings about the ocean of change that has already begun. I believe it can happen 🙂